Protecting Source Code

[Andrew Bennetts]

On Fri, May 09, 2003 at 05:42:35PM +1000, Cameron Zemek wrote:
> 
> > > How can I protect my python source code for a commerical application?
> >
> > You can't, really. You can freeze the code into an executable.
> >
> > This comes up over and over -- see previous discussions at, for instance,
> >
> > http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&safe=off&q=protect+source&btnG=Google+Search&meta=group%3Dcomp.lang.python.*
> 
> Okay, but is python byte-code as safe as compiled Java code for instance?

Yes, that is "not at all".

> Are there obfuscation tools for python available? More importantly how much
> information can be gathered about the source code from python byte-code?

There are no obfuscators that I know of, but I've never looked.  As with
Java, you can reconstruct complete source with pretty much everything intact
except comments from the byte-code.

I'm certain this has been covered regularly in this newsgroup in the past.
See the archives for detail discussions on this topic.

-Andrew.